Merike Estna: The House of Leaking Sky

The Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art presents The House of Leaking Sky, a new exhibition by Merike Estna, curated by Natalia Sielewicz, for the Estonian Pavilion at the 61st International Venice Biennale. Throughout the 2026 Biennale, Estna paints in public view, transforming the act of painting into an ongoing performance.

Merike Estna is an internationally recognised Estonian artist whose practice centres on painting, often extending it into space, objects and performance. She approaches painting as a live, durational act, foregrounding time, labour and the ongoing process of making. 

In The House of Leaking Sky, Estna begins with a blank canvas, activated by pouring paint directly onto the floor. She continues painting daily in public view, with the surface gradually saturated through repeated acts of work and presence. As she works, the artist wears garments developed with designer Lilli Jahilo as part of the performance. By the close of the exhibition, the paintings will form a single expansive work across twenty-two canvases.

By inviting audiences into the unfolding of the work itself, Estna unsettles divisions about where art, and by extension, where women, are permitted to exist. Painting slowly and in public view foregrounds the visibility of the painter, placing her practice in dialogue with histories of women artists whose work was shaped by domestic labour and family life. The project calls to mind the pittore senza opera, the painter without recognised works, often embodied by women whose practices were excluded from official histories.

As the artwork develops, the pavilion is shaped around Estna’s working process. The exhibition architecture, designed by research-based studio D_P_S, founded by Diogo Passarinho, has been developed in close dialogue with both the building and Estna’s evolving painting. Once complete, the work is expected to be one of the largest paintings created during the Biennale, measuring approximately twenty-two by six metres.

The exhibition extends beyond the canvases onto the pavilion floor, covered with ceramic tiles painted by the artist, while studio objects such as ladders, platforms, tables and tools remain present and in use. These elements form part of the conditions of making, as the boundary between public and private, studio and home loosens, and painting unfolds across surfaces, objects and gestures as part of daily life.

Living in Venice with her family during the Venice Biennale 2026, Estna brings motherhood into the conceptual structure of the project, drawing on myths of creation in which world making unfolds through care, repetition and maintenance. Here, creation emerges through everyday gestures such as gathering, tending and sustaining, where continuity is produced through endurance, weaving together meditations on motherhood with the lineages of women artists.

The House of Leaking Sky will also host The School of Strange Weather from August 11 to 16. During this period, Estna will offer the pavilion as an open-ended experimental platform for Contemporary Art MA students from the Estonian Academy of Arts, where she has been a professor since August 2025. 

The artist will be present and paint in the pavilion from Wednesday to Sunday, typically beginning in the morning and working throughout the day, with Mondays and Tuesdays reserved as non-working days.

About Merike Estna
Merike Estna lives and works in Tallinn and Mexico City. Her practice centres on painting, extending into space, objects, and performance. She studied at the Estonian Academy of Arts and Goldsmiths, University of London, and has received several major Estonian art awards, including the Konrad Mägi Prize (2014). She has been a professor of contemporary art at the Estonian Academy of Arts since 2025.

About Natalia Sielewicz
Natalia Sielewicz is chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Her work engages with feminism, affect, and contemporary subjectivity, often navigating the boundary between the personal and the universal.

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